[geeks] PC question

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 11:52:38PM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> On Friday 21 February 2003 22:09, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > Xfree has open source Nvidia drivers that are 24bit and accelerated (but
> > very badly), so it isn't exactly Nvidia's fault that the BeOS people
> > can't do the same.
> 
> Last time I tried, they didn't. How fast reverse enineering goes! We finally 
> have acceleration on our tnt2's...

Yeah.  Woohoo, or something.

> > That said, Nvidia isn't exactly the most open source friendly.  But
> > then, none of the companies are that great.  Last I heard (possibly out
> > of data with the new weather channel financed work) ATI cards had open
> > sourced drivers made from info provided by ATI, but they had no T&L
> > acceleration, let alone shader support.
> 
> I have no idea WHAT they do in software and what not... 

I could right a program quickly to test T&L support, but I don't really
have the energy right now.  Basically, all you need is a program that
has a lot of small triangles, lit but not textured (small and not
textured to make sure that you aren't stressing the rasterizer), with
the triangles being put in a display list.  Then, if there is very
little to no CPU load, the graphic card is doing the T&L work.  If the
CPU load is high, the CPU is doing the work, not the graphics card.